johnnyutah wrote:
So what do you do to a resume to make it awesome? I've had Career Services edit the shit out of mine already, and they say it's good, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything (Career Services does not always give good advice).
You have to tailor each resume to the job you are applying for, and highlight certain aspect of your previous experiences and education to fit the objective you are writing for that job. A lot of employers look at candidate and don't look for brilliant/smart people, they look for people who would fit in and be comfortable from the get go. So you have to convince them that you have done the same job before by presenting what they are expecting to see. One of the easiest thing to do is only apply to jobs that have extensive listing of duties/requirements, then tailor your resume to cover/show as much as the duties/requirements as possible, then write a cover letter further outlining your experiences and how you are exactly the person they are searching for.
Of course I don't have quantitative data to support this, but if you use the most of the same words they use in the ad, I think you are already miles ahead. Most resume readers scan resumes on first read, so if you have the right keywords in there, it will more likely to be read.
I actually worked for a short time for a company that sells a scanner system that scans all paper resumes, OCRs them and index them for keyword searches like a search engine. So if your resume hits all the right words, you are likely to get indexed up front.
